How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well

"Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has been recommended many times on Five Books , and I also met a man at a lunch last summer (he was Greek, admittedly) who told me that it was all I needed to read to understand everything about life. As a result, I was very pleased to see a new book in Princeton University Press’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, offering selections from it. The books in this series provide the important parts of the text in the original language, a translation on the facing page, as well as explanations of what it’s all about. Susan Sauvé Meyer of the University of Pennsylvania takes on the task in How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well, which includes about a quarter of the text of The Nicomachean Ethics. This is not, I would say, an introductory book—it starts with a close look at the Greek word for living well, eudaimonia , and how best to translate it—but more a way to dip your toe into an important primary source without being overwhelmed. Also new in ethics books, there’s a “fully updated and expanded” version of Ethics in the Real World by Peter Singer , the Australian-American philosopher behind the effective altruism movement, one of our best philosophy books of 2016. These are short essays, mostly from Singer’s Project Syndicate column, addressing issues like: “Can Ethics Be Taught?”, “The Case for Going Vegan” and “Why Google War Wrong” to fire James Damore for his comments about women in tech. Also newly republished and updated is his 1975 classic, Animal Liberation Now ."